“Picture and Collection Bar”

This is another one of those projects I found on Pinterest & decided to make a DIY implementation of. The original pin describes it as a “picture and collection bar”.

Essentially using a wooden strip to trap marbles in such a way that they have a little movement but due to the sloped design will always try to move downward and towards the wall.

This means that if you push a piece of paper through the gap at the bottom, there is enough movement for the marbles to get out of its way but they will immediately roll down, providing just enough friction to hold the paper – but not enough friction to prevent you from easily removing the paper again if you need to.

It’s kind of like an ultra slim pin board, but without having to put holes in your paper.

Design
The original design I found used pretty thin strips that appear to be jointed it mitred angles.

Instead I opted for using a larger piece of oak, but then cutting out an angled gap for the marbles.

The cross section looks something like this:

Construction
The actual construction of this was very simple, just a series of rebate cuts on the table saw, occasionally making one of them angled, and making one very us at the bottom of the piece, so that when it’s up against the wall there is a slight gap as can be seen in the above diagram, which will allow paper to pass through.

Then I capped off the ends with a little piece of mahogany, to prevent the marbles from rolling out the sides – this is simply glued and pinned in place – and then finally some finishing.

As the piece of oak I was using was reclaimed and had a couple of screw holes, I patched one which looks a little bit like a knot in the wood, and the other two which were at the edges, I decided to patch using brass tacks, as the holes were in a position where if I were going to screw this to the wall I would have put holes anyway.

Mounting
The tricky part of this project is mounting it to the wall. My design does not have a back piece because I did not want it to protrude too far from the wall. The downside of this means until it is on the wall, the marbles could fall out the back.

So, firstly, I filled the back with some marbles.

 I then used gaffer tape across the back of the marbles and the lower part of the bar – leaving the side top bit exposed as this is where the adhesive is going to go. I left enough excess gaffer tape to be able to fold it round so that there was a ‘handle’ hanging off the bottom of the bar.

Obviously the next step is to mark out a position on the wall to mount it, make sure that it is level, etc. Then apply the glue to the back of the bar, and stick it to the wall.

Once you’re confident that the glue set, you can put on the gaffer tape ‘handle’, to peel the tape away from the marbles on the back, releasing them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Result

Singer sewing machine table

The finished product

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy)

 

The Beginning

This old Singer sewing machine belonged to my grandparents, and then spent years left in my parents garage until I got interested in leather work and took it, wondering if it might be usable for that.

Although the machine itself seems mechanically sound the electronics seem to be trashed.

Using it trips the circuit breaker, the belt from the motor to the machine was hanging together by a thread, so all in all, not very successful.

To begin with, I removed all the electrical pieces - the machine can still be hand-operated without them, and I wanted to make use of it, so I could always return to those later.

I'd seen similar sewing machine models that were part of a table or cabinet set-up, with cast iron legs and treadle operated.

I'm told that this machine originally used to have one, back when it was my grandparents', but they have since been lost to the sands of time.

I was hoping to be able to recreate that, but it seems they are rather sought-after by trendy people turning them into side tables, which has pushed the price up considerably.

So, instead of going for an accurate restoration, I opted for an 'inspired by' build. 

The base of the machine is quite thick, due to the mechanical workings underneath the machine, but for using it on a worktop, the step can be quite annoying, so my idea was to make a butcher-block style surface, which the machine can be recessed into.

I opted to build my own butcher block from pallet wood, to keep costs down, and to give myself an excuse to buy a planer/thicknesser (still worked out cheaper than just buying a butcher block!)

 

I'd aimed for a maximum dimensions of 100cm x 50cm table surface, in order to fit the space I'd allocated for putting the table in my home.

The bulk of the butcher block construction is simply, plane, thickness, trim, glue, clamp, wait, repeat.

Rather than build one solid block and cut the recess for the sewing machine in, I decided to build the block in four different sections - full-length front and back sections, and then two shorter side sections, leaving a gap in the middle to form the recess.

This allowed me to cater for space constraints in the workshop, tool limitations (maximum width of the thicknesser), and to make use of the shorter lengths of pallet wood.

I also opted to offset the recess to move the machine towards the right of the tabletop, to increase space on the left hand side, which is where the sewing would be done.

The four main segments - the blue area is where the sewing machine will be recessed

Before

 

After

Once that was done, the edges were straightened up and some strips of mahogany were attached to the end to cover the end grain, and tidy-up the design.

3 coach bolts were added and recessed on each side to provide some mechanical retention and also to add to the rustic-industrial aesthetic.

The gap in the middle was by design slightly smaller than the footprint of the sewing machine - this allowed me to cut a rebate to size and provide a platform for the machine to sit on.

Additionally the machine has 2 hinges, which although I needn't use them (as I have access to the underside of the machine from under the table top), they are cast into the frame of the machine, so had to drill recesses for them also.

I also cut recesses for the latches from the original case, and mounted those into the surface, so that I could use the lid from the case.

Legs

By this time I'd managed to find a set of the cast iron treadle legs, but unfortunately without the treadle. Nonetheless, they still made a good stand.

 

Woodstore / Planter from reclaimed wood (old shed)

After finishing the upcycled planter by the firepit, I realised that something similar would be useful as a wood store for the firepit, and would also help define a boundary to the patio and fire pit area.

Looking through the remaining timber from the shed, there was still the shed floor, and the second long wall to use, and the short (back) wall

These formed the back and front of the second planter, with the back wall being split into 2 lengths to provide the sides, in mostly matching dimensions to the first planter.

To help keep the wood dry, the shed door and it's hinges were repurposed. The thing is, the planter is around 8 foot long, and the door only 6.

To overcome this, it's split into 2 sections, with a divider made from part of the shed front. The 6 foot section with the lid is the woodstore, and the remaining 2 foot section was lined out with plastic to create another planter, in the same manner as the first planter.

The idea is that this will house climbing plants to grow along the trellis that has been installed on the fence at the back of the patio.

The door had to be trimmed down as the planter was narrower, and the hinges had to be switched to the opposite side. A bit of scrap chain (left over from the light fitting project), and an odd carabiner clip I had lying around, were looped around the tree to provide a latch to hold the lid open when needed.

Bonus Planter

That was meant for making planters. But, when I set out with all these garden builds, I did set a 'zero-ish' waste rule. And when the bricks were delivered, they came in a wooden crate, which would then need disposing of.

Plus there were a few miscellaneous bits of shed panel left, which were otherwise just going to be firewood.

So I quickly whipped up a third mini-planter to go out on the front lawn. It's pretty rough and ready, but will serve it's purpose, at least for now and until I have more definite plans of the work I want to do out front.

 

 

The bonus planter, just needs top soil and plants

Planter from old shed

When working on the patio and fire pit, I took on the challenge of 'zero-ish' waste - not having any more waste than could fit in the regular household bins. No skips, special collections etc.

On the opposite side to where the fire pit was built, there was an old shed, which wasn't in bad condition, but was unwanted.

It was taken down so that we could make use of the paving slabs which were being used as it's base.

Along the side of where the raised patio was being built, there was a gap which used to have long-dead roses in - the area marked in brown in the patio-plan model below

Just eye-balling it, I could see that the length of the shed (approx 8 feet), was about the same, and came up with the idea of using the sides to create a raised planter there. 

It also helped the zero-ish waste plan, as the planter would provide space for re-homing soil removed during the fire pit and patio builds, as it could be filled up from ground-level

The frame was simple, just the four sides simply screwed together - leaving the bottom open for drainage.

The front panel was cut down from the front of the shed (below the windows), and the back of the planter was one of the roof panels of the shed. The sides were the other roof panel, cut lengthways.

The back of the planter is higher than the front - I considered cutting it down, but it does provide some utility in that it gives a place to mount things like chicken wire/frost protection/cold frames over the top of the plants if need be, and as it is still lower than the fence itself, I decided to leave it alone.

And finally some miscellaneous bits of shed timber was used to add trim to the top of the panels, which also served to pin the plastic liner in place.

The wood was treated with normal fence stain/wood preservative.

The insides of the frame are lined with plastic sheet (which as it happens, is also up-cycled from some packaging.) and stood on some slab offcuts to protect the wood from moisture caused by contact with the wet soil.

 

 

Live-edge oak spotlight light fixture - part 2 - adding ambience

In my previous post, I built a hanging light fitting of live-edge oak and recessed GU10 spotlights.

There is actually more to the project.

Sometimes, spotlights can be a bit overpowering, and it's preferable to have some ambient, indirect light.

During construction, I had the idea of creating this light in a way that would allow use of the spotlights, an ambient light, or both.

To create the ambient light, I used LED strips on the reverse (upward-facing) side, to reflect light off the ceiling.

I cut some thin strips of oak with a 45-degree angle and mounted them in a rectangle on the back - angled side outward, to help direct the light. An RGB LED strip was mounted all around this.

Control

I initially thought of using the LED driver that tends to come standard with rolls of LED strip, but as the existing wiring leads to only one switch, without some rewiring through the ceilings/walls, it would be limited to either having both the spotlights and the ambient light on, or just the spotlights on without the ambient light - it would not be possible to have the ambient light on without the spotlights.

In order to combat this, and to lay groundwork for a potential future project, I included a solid-state relay and an Arduino. The arduino would drive TIP31 transistors to drive the 3 channels for the LEDs red, green and blue, and additionally control a solid state relay which would act as the switch for the spotlights.

The idea would then be that the light switch would remain on, more like a utility switch, and then all control of the light fitting would be handed over to the Arduino.

 

Power

 

The original wiring sketch.
it's just a rough sketch,
not a proper wiring diagram.

 

The LED strips take 12V, and the microcontroller takes 5V, so a PSU is needed to bring the power down to usable levels.

For this I used an old net-book power supply. This was wired into the back of the light fitting. Caution is needed to make sure that nothing too powerful is used, as typically a houses' lighting circuit breaker is tripped at a much lower current than the mains sockets.

 

Revised to include the additional components

This would normally be plugged into a wall socket, where it's plug would have a fuse. However in order to wire this into the lighting wiring, the plug would need to be removed - obviously this introduces a safety concern. To ensure that this would still be fused, I replaced the wall switch for the light to one that includes a fuse, ensuring that the light is behind the fuse.

 

Communication

To communicate with the Arduino, I used a cheap HC-05 bluetooth to serial adapter, the same as I've used in other projects like the Bluetooth Macro keyboard app.

The arduino receives 4 bytes, followed by newline characters. These correspond to 1 byte each for the red, green and blue channels in the LED strip, and the final byte is either a simple 0 or 1 to indicate if the spotlights should be on.

For now this is sent by pairing with my phone and using a bluetooth serial terminal app from the Google play store. I'll probably create a more custom app in future, but for proving the concept, this works just fine.

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy)

Live-edge oak spotlight light fixture

The basic idea

The idea is that the fitting uses GU10 spotlight fittings like those typically recessed into ceilings.

However, instead of recessing them into the ceiling, they're recessed into a piece of live-edge wood, which is hung from the ceiling like a more traditional light fitting.

The woodwork

There's not much really in the way of woodwork in this project, just clean off bark and splintery bits from the live edge, preserving as much of the edge as possible.

Quite a bit of sanding was also needed to clear up the surfaces.

The end of the board I had was cleanly sawn which I thought detracted from the live edges, so I broke the corners down with a carving disc on an angle grinder.

Creating grooves for
the spotlights latches

Then measure the centre line. I started by taking the average width of the board and working from that, but there is some leeway - having both sides be live edge makes this near impossible to find a perfect centre line, but ultimately as long as it looks central to the naked eye.

The spotlight fittings are not designed to go through the thickness of the board - after all, they're intended for plasterboard ceilings. While it won't affect the functioning of the light, it means that the spring loaded clips that latch. To work around this, I used a forstner drill to thin around the edge of the spotlight holes where the latch would sit - This is easier to do before the main spotlight hole is cut out, to stop the forstner bit from slipping.

Then I cut out the holes for the spotlights by drilling a pilot hole and widening with a jigsaw.

Test fit of one of the light surrounds

Wiring the spotlights

The three spotlights are wired in parallel, split across 2 junction boxes. Having them in parallel means that if one bulb was to fail, the others could continue to function.

 

To make installing the light easier, the lead that connects from the ceiling to the wood itself included a 'kettle plug' style plug and socket, simply so that the wiring could be done on the workbench, and just plugged in at the time of installation.

 

Mounting

The ceiling roses were purchased, and have simple hooks on them for hanging the chain.

Eyelet screws were attached in the back of the wood at each corner, from which the chain was attached.

Enough leeway was given on the chains so that adjustment could be made to ensure that the light hangs flat.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy)

Tray Stand / Foldable Table

While lockdown has prevented me from being able to get back to many woodworking projects this year, I did manage to cut a few offcuts to size and sand them in order to fashion a stand for a bamboo tray. The idea being for it to be a temporary table or drinks stand in our small patch of outside space.

The construction is a simple X-frame, with horizontal bars at each of the four points - 2 to support the tray, 2 to act as feet. These are joined to the X-frame using a 3D-printed bracket - the SCAD file for this is up on GitHub.

In order to stop the frame from spreading out and collapsing under the weight of the tray and it's contents, the feet were joined with some denim fabric, courtesy of an old pair of jeans. This allows the stand to be folded up, but providing plenty of rigidity during use.

Sewing things other than leather is a pretty new thing to me, my only prior sewing-related project being the lanyard I made a while back. So I'm the first to admit it's not the neatest work, but it does the job, so can't complain.

With the benefit of hindsight, the hinges allowed a bit too much flexibility, allowing the cross-bars to roll. The fabric on the feet alleviates this at the bottom. On the top, the base of the tray has a small lip which helps latch onto the cross-bars - whilst they still roll, it's impact is minimised and the tray/table works fine.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on May 26, 2020 at 4:02am PDT

3 Panel Oak Picture/Poster Frame

A few years ago I bought a set of three Hotline Miami posters from the Eurogamer Expo. As much as I liked them I never round to hanging them - I kept telling myself I'd get a good frame, but never did.


This frame was made from a single piece of oak, and consists of dovetail-like joints in for the middle of the structure with half-lap miters for the corners.

The glass was upcycled from 3 individual picture frames from the local scrapyard - The existing frames were completely mismatched and in a bad state, but they all happened to have the same size glass, which cleaned up easily for this new frame.

Pic of the finished frame below, with sketch/build video below.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Sep 12, 2018 at 4:38am PDT

Drinko Plinko

This is far from an original project - Turns out "Plinko" was popularised by The Price is Right, but I only ever knew it from the drinking related version...

The finished project

 

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Aug 8, 2018 at 1:59pm PDT

The premise is simple. There's a bottle opener at the top, a field of pins in the middle, and a number of boxes at the bottom. Bottle gets opened, bottle top falls into the field, bounces around the pins, and goes into one of the boxes at the bottom - these usually come with forfeits/suggestions like "Down it", "Take a shot" etc.

The build

The grid was based off a template from a half inch isometric dots.

Use a bottle cap to measure which points should be used and mark them.
Spray glue the template(s) down to the backing board - don't forget to allow space at the top for the bottle opener itself.

Simply place a nail at each point marked on the template, paying attention to keep the nail heights constant.


Once that's done, peel away the template and remove the nails.
Position the backing image as desired, and then replace the nails - you should be able to do this by feeling for the holes under the background image.

The edges are simply mitred and attached to the backing board with glue and brad nails. They had a rebate cut into them to hold the plastic/glass front.


The wood I used was chipboard from some old drawers, so the rebate was already there. I intended to sand down the wood, but in combination with the grey/blue paint I used, it gave a neat faux-concrete look which fit well with the Fallout/post-apocalyptic theme, so I decided to leave it.

The five 'buckets' at the bottom were just small scraps, painted and also attached to the backing with glues and brad nails.
The front is a bit of clear plastic I salvaged from a broken poster frame and cut to size.

Screw the bottle opener into place and all that's left is to decorate.

For the forfeit stickers I found some character images of Fallout characters online, and used the Monofonto font, which is similar to the font used in Fallout, and created the forfeits.

• Brotherhood of Steel - Cheers! - no forfeit
• Super Mutant - Take a drink
• "Glowing One" Ghoul - Take a drink
• Mirelurk - Down it
• Deathclaw - Take a shot

These were printed onto clear adhesive vinyl, cut out and stuck to the backing board. In hindsight they could've done with a lighter background to help them stand out (when working with transparencies, it's easy to forget that the white background won't necessarily be there in the end), but live and learn.

Wooden Pallet Mallet

I typically don't do much woodwork over the winter as the weather has a tendency to suck the enjoyment out of things.

When I set-up to start again in the spring, I usually find that I need a simple project to warm up and refresh my techniques before I get involved with something more complex.

Normally it's a bit of a throwaway project that I wouldn't put online, but this one was very simple to create and has been very useful, so I thought that it might be of use to others.

This year I made a wooden mallet as I needed one for leatherwork.

The handle was two strips of pallet wood glued up and shaped around a hammer handle.



The head of the mallet is one of the end blocks, also from a pallet.

The finished mallet. Simple, but effective

The technique is simple - drill through the centre of the block to create an opening that the top of the handle can fit through, but is narrow enough to make a tight fit.

Then drill through the part of the handle that protrudes from the top of the block and wedge a dowel in place to prevent the block from slipping. (The block is actually a tight enough fit that this is a little bit unnecessary, but it adds an extra layer of safety, and a bit more of an aesthetic quality to things).

Everything after that is just a matter of sanding and shaping.

Wedding Sign

I was asked to create a sign for a wedding. They're planning on having Karaoke and wanted a sign pointing to the bar for "Dutch courage".

Design


After exchanging a few ideas and a couple of preliminary sketches, we arrived at this design. Most of the graphics came from clipart, and the typeface is "URW Chancery L" in 132pt.


The overall size is  approximately a the size of an A3 piece of paper. As I don't have an A3 printer, I split the design across a few A4 sheets for printing.

Then came several hours of carving out the letters and patterns with a scalpel to create the stencil for later spray painting.









Building the sign
The sign is created from joining 3 lengths of up-cycled pallet wood. As with the Treasure Chest, the jointing was done manually with a combination of hand planing and simply finding lengths of wood that lined up well together.

The supports at the back of the sign for the stand

The wood is glued together, and also there are cross beams on the back - one at the top and one at the bottom.

These also form the mount for the stand.








The wood for the stand same from an old garden parasol that I upcycled. As it's previous life was as an object that hinged at various points and was designed to be folded, it was ideally sized - all I needed was to cut down the lengths. The pivot is nothing fancy, just a single screw.



The entire sign was sanded, and stained with a teak wood stain. An early attempt at stencilling the sign didn't go well, so the front ended up being sanded and stained a second time.
This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as after the second coat the woodgrain was much more pronounced and looked much better for it.

The arrow
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but it crossed my mind that although the venue and location has already been set for the wedding, Murphy's Law suggests that when the wedding rolls round, things will have changed and the arrow will end up pointing the wrong way, so I came up with the idea of making it a magnetic stick-on arrow so it could be swapped around.

The rear of the arrow with metal strip

Magnets embedded into the surface of the sign for mounting the arrow

I cut the arrow on the bandsaw, and painted it white, then a cut a section of flat steel and epoxyed it to the back of the arrow.
Then in the place on the sign where the arrow was to be mounted, I used a forstner drill to drill 3 inlays. In each of these holes I epoxyed a circular magnet so that it sat flush with the face of the sign.


Painting
I taped the stencil to the face of the sign, and applied two coats of enamel white spray paint. Unfortunately the delicate patterns on the edge of the stencil didn't work too well with the spray, so once a couple of sprays were down to mark out the position of the design, I removed the stencil and started painting by hand. To do this I sprayed some of the paint into the cap, and used a thin brush.

The end result

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Mar 7, 2018 at 4:40am PST

Desk Stationery Organiser with pin and chalk board sides

This project was a spur-of-the-moment "Pinterest request".

Without any prior planning, I was given a picture from Pinterest and asked "Can you make me something like this?"

The pin in question was this desk organiser:


I found some thin plywood offcuts that were roughly 2/3s to 3/4s of the length of a new pencil, so figured that was about the correct height.

The length of the offcuts was slightly longer - approx 9 1/2 inches. It seemed a bit too much to split into 2 4-and-something inch pots, so rather than cut it down and create waste, I'd make my desk organiser three pots of roughly 3 inches each.

For the width, I figured it would look best if the pots were square, so I found some other offcuts and cut them to 3 inches.

The end result is a three-pot desk organiser with pots of that are 3x3 inches by somewhere between 4 and 5 inches tall.

For the base, I cut a length of pallet wood and cut grooves along the position of each of the middle dividers, and in turn cut a short section of each divider, so that the dividers would sit in the grooves:


On one end I cut a finger groove, as sticky notes are a standard 3x3 inch square, so one of the pots could be used as a dispenser for them.

I took apart a 'corkboard' (which turned out to be a thin veneer of cork over cardboard, and glued this around one side and the back.
On the front (the sticky-note side) I took part of the cork veneer and glued it on - purely for aesthetic reasons.

On the other side I attached a thin, flat piece of hardboard coated in chalkboard paint (which according to the tin was supposed to also be magnetic, but in reality isn't.)

I re-purposed some of the old corkboards frame to create a neat border around it all, and it was done.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Nov 3, 2017 at 5:26am PDT

Reclaimed Wood Pirate/Treasure Chest

The first step was to join the slats together to create the boards that will form the sides of the chest.

As I don't have access to a planer/jointer this was a case of hand planing boards where necessary and being selective which boards matched together best.

In the absence of enough clamps I screwed the boards to a piece of scrap wood to hold them in place whilst the glue dried.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Aug 16, 2017 at 5:19am PDT

With the boards joined, I could get a better idea of how the panels would fit together.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Aug 24, 2017 at 4:15am PDT

The panels were too big to cut on my small tabletop saw, so I opted for handcut box joints.

I measured them so that the would line up with each of the slats on the long sides of the chest.

Cutting the curved top required some maths to match up the number of slats that would form the lid with the angle that would need to be cut in each slat to form a proper semi-circle.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Aug 30, 2017 at 4:18am PDT

Once these were cut I glued them and used a metal bar bent to a curve to temporarily screw them to as it was not possible to use a clamp.

The handles are simple bought. The hinges were standard trangular shaped hinges, but in order for them to work with the curve of the lid, I bent them to a curve by heating them with a heat-gun and a hammer.

Finding a suitable padlock was more difficult - sure, DIY stores sell padlocks, but I wanted something more old-fashioned looking to fit the "pirate chest" aesthetic. After quite a bit of searching I found this one at a car boot sale.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Sep 26, 2017 at 5:05am PDT

For finishing, I used the heat gun to heat the wood to the point where it started to brown (almost like toast), without burning. I thought about going the burn-and-sand method, but at this point I had invested enough time in the project that I didn't want to risk it.

Finally, the chest was finished with a coat of oil to help highlight the grain

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Oct 13, 2017 at 1:58pm PDT